The Perceived Arrogance of Intellectual Humility
The idea that we know nothing at all is quite powerful. In fact, it’s the basis of one on humanity’s most powerful tools: the Scientific Method.
In using the Scientific Method, one assumes that he is wrong and endeavors to find evidence of his wrongness. Only after sufficiently failing to find this disconfirming evidence can a scientist claim to have discovered some sort of truth, usually referred to as a theory.
Despite the connotations of its name, the Scientific Method can be applied to any pursuit that aims at finding truth, whether in a lab or out in the “real world”. In fact, before science existed, those people who most rigorously pursued truth, philosophers, employed one of its most fundamental principles: intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is just the basic idea that we all know relatively nothing and that we should approach our interactions with the the world and others as such. As Elon Musk says, “You should take the approach that you are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
Socrates was perhaps the most rigorous of any of the philosophers in his application of intellectual humility. As he says in Apology:
“I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is that God only is wise; the wisdom of men is little or nothing. He is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go my way and make inquisition into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then I show him that he is not wise.”
This quote is quite striking to me for one weird reason: it appears to demonstrate both extreme arrogance and extreme humility. Socrates appears at one time to be both extremely humble in his knowledge of how little he knows and also extremely arrogant in his matter-of-fact pursuit of showing others how little they know. This apparent paradox, that those who most rigorously practice intellectual humility are often perceived as arrogant has presented itself several times (the case of Sam Hinkie is a particularly illuminating example) and puzzled me for awhile.
Before exploring this idea further, we need some context for Socrates’ quote. This quote comes from Socrates’ trial, in which he ended up being condemned to die for “corrupting the youth”. As Socrates demonstrates in Apology, the “corrupting the youth” charge is completely unfounded and was brought by men who hated him. Why did they hate him? Well, as Socrates says, he went around showing everyone how little they knew. Many people were quite annoyed by this and found him arrogant.
But was Socrates actually arrogant? Socrates, as he claims in Apology, probably was the wisest citizen of Athens. He travelled all around specifically looking for and hoping to find someone wiser than himself and could not find one such person. He genuinely wanted to find disconfirming evidence (of the hypothesis that he was the wisest person in Athens), but he could not. Thus, he justifiably concluded that he was the wisest person in Athens, precisely because he was cognizant of how little he knew more than any other person was cognizant of his respective knowledge gaps.
Given that Socrates probably was the wisest member of Athens, it is not quite correct to call him “arrogant”, at least in the pejorative sense. True, Socrates had conviction that he was the wisest citizen of Athens, but this conviction is justified by the scientific process (stooped in intellectual humility) that led him to his conclusion. If Socrates were to find someone in Athens wiser than him, then he would have gladly updated his belief just as a scientist presented with new evidence would update his theory to include the new evidence.
This all leads to what I fashion to be a quite beautiful paradox: those who best understand how little they know, tend to know the most and be the most wise.
Rigorously pursuing truth using the Scientific Method and intellectual humility is just an objectively better method of truth-seeking than assuming you already know most things or that your current beliefs are true. Doing the latter induces mental constraints that cloud your ability to see reality clearly and integrate disconfirming evidence into your belief structure. Thus, it should be expected that those who are most intellectually humble will tend to be the wisest (by wise I refer to an ability to see truth). It should also be expected that many will confuse the justified conviction of a scientist (or one employing the scientific method) with the unjustified, arrogant conviction of someone who has not tested his beliefs or assumptions. Learning to tell the difference is perhaps the first step in the acquisition of good judgment, but that’s a post for another day.
